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Improve Apple Services with AirPort Base Stations

You can make iChat file transfers, iDisk, and Back to My Mac work better by turning on a setting with Apple AirPort base stations released starting in 2003. Launch AirPort Utility, select your base station, click Manual Setup, choose the Internet view, and click the NAT tab. Check the Enable NAT Port Mapping Protocol (NAT-PMP) box, and click Update. NAT-PMP lets your Mac OS X computer give Apple information to connect back into a network that's otherwise unreachable from the rest of the Internet. This speeds updates and makes connections work better for services run by Apple.

SETI@home Moves to BOINC Client

SETI@home Moves to BOINC Client -- If you're anything like me, you don't pay much, if any, attention to SETI@home clients you may have running on machines with CPU cycles to donate to the search for extraterrestrial life. But Jim Carr, one of the top members of the TidBITS SETI team, alerted me recently that the classic SETI@home client is being turned off as of 15-Dec-05, and everyone who wants to continue donating spare CPU cycles must move to the new BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) client that supports not just SETI@home, but a variety of other distributed computing projects. The SETI@home page has the necessary instructions for downloading the latest BOINC client and requesting your account information. Unfortunately, it's a slightly obtuse process, and I wasn't able to convince BOINC to attach to the SETI@home project, but the error message implied temporary server problems (which the SETI@home folks have mentioned on their news page). I recommend waiting a bit before converting; either check the SETI@home site every so often to see if they've resolved their technical difficulties or look for another note in TidBITS. If you're new to the SETI@home project and want to join the TidBITS team, follow the third link below and click Join once there. [ACE]